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Thursday, November 12, 2015

A little catching up to do.

For whatever reason it has been difficult for me to get stuff written this season. So lets play a little catch up... Back in August I went to Thompson with NASA for a single day event. It was the only event I could make in that time frame due to work, so I just went to get some driving in. Much to my surprise the track had been repaved again since my last visit. That coupled with never running there with aero made for a weird day. I was really light on sleep (surprised?), and after about 1 session it became apparent it was a throw away day. There was very little grip in the track. I upped the wing angle a little and it helped, but I was still well off my old pace so I just kind of phoned it in for the day. Even managed to tear my oil temp gauge wire somehow... Never bothered pulling the data or video Didn't have any events lined up in September so I did some autocross in the S2000 to hold me over until the NASA season finale in October. Also spent the time to put some more power in the car thanks to the gift of E85. The car is a whole different beast now. The E85 makes it feel peppier everywhere in the power band and really really works great with the stock turbo. I was very interested to see how it would work out on track.

Got denied a vacation day so I had to work all day Friday and then start the long haul down to NJMP. We wound up arriving around midnight, got unloaded and tried to sleep...yeah right. Saturday was a nice day, got reacquainted with the car and Thunder and everything seemed to be going as planned. Just got to drive which was nice. Sunday proved to be a decent bit colder to the point of requiring some tire pressure changes. Had a nice Sunday drive, car handles, performed etc...until I looked at the data and found out I was 2.5 seconds slower than when I was there in June. This was obviously not the way I wanted to end the season. The car felt so comfortable and controlled that it was one of those "I feel slow so I must be fast" moments. In trying to figure out what happened, I can only guess that I either didn't set the wing back to the proper angle since the car had some under steer in a specific high speed right hander on the track. The only other potential is that the front spring change I made over the summer didn't show the small upset in balance it made at Lightning due to the style of track. Here's the video:

My winter upgrade list wasn't to extensive for this year. Some cooling upragdes and minor suspension tweaks. Now they've gone and reworked the TT3 rules so I'm going to have to rethink a few things...I'll update as we get a little deeper into the offseason. I think I'm most upset tat I didn't reach my goal of getting a TT license by the end of 2015...sigh.